INTERVIEW: Hope springs eternal for Rabbi Miriam Berger
Finchley Reform's Senior Rabbi tells Michelle Rosenberg why she is stepping down after 18 years to set up Wellspring, an organisation dedicated to the ritual of the mikveh
The news that communal stalwart Rabbi Miriam Berger was stepping down after 18 years at the helm of Finchley Reform synagogue sent more than a few shockwaves through both the north London shul and wider communities.
In July 2024, Rabbi Berger will officially leave her spiritual home to found Wellspring, the first of its kind in the UK and a champion of complementary therapies and the ritual of the mikveh immersion bath.
As reported by Jewish News, Wellspring describes itself as “a place where people will find ways to heal and rejuvenate their mind, body and soul” and plans to offer “a preventative and therapeutic approach to good mental health, promoting resilience, building and incorporating Jewish rituals such as immersion into active wellbeing and recovery.”
Speaking exclusively to Jewish News, Rabbi Berger makes it very clear that stepping down from her role as a rabbi who leads the community is very different from leaving the community altogether.
She says that working with people pastorally has made her recognise how broken life’s events can leave us, that “some people find it much easier to lean into life following setbacks than others. I think there is something around creating individual rituals with people that enables them to take back control.”
She believes that “they craft the moment, whether it is in the mikveh or in a specially designed havdallah ceremony, they take back the power by deciding what they need to say or do in order to think about what they want it to do for them.”
Speaking from intensely personal experience, she confides that as a happily married couple struggling to conceive and being made so miserable by multiple failed IVF attempts, she “wanted to take back control of my body, we wanted our relationship to be about what we had and not what we didn’t have and we were committed to closing the chapter of struggle in order to embrace a chapter during which we could choose life.
I found the mikveh in that moment was the place I could commit to changing my mindset and outlook.
She says she’s since found she can help others to “make their own moments, taking back control of their life after infidelities, bereavements, abuse and periods of ill health.”
As to the question as to whether Wellspring is a continuation of her work in ‘ritual’, she says that whilst Jewish life is centred predominantly in the home and synagogue, she hopes to bring another space into people’s lives.
“I am used to creating ritual life-cycle moments in the way that our Judaism has traditionally prescribed whether it be birth, bnei mitzvah, marriage or death. Yet there are countless other moments that if we could ritualise as poignantly as we do those ones, people would make transitions in their lives much healthier.
“Our ancient rabbis were also mental health experts; you only have to see our mourning rituals to know that and yet they could never have conceived of retirement as an equally important moment of transition to do well. There are also rituals that need perhaps their own space and the guidance of real mental health practitioners to do really well.”
As to whether Wellspring could serve as a blueprint, Rabbi Berger says that Jami, the mental health service for the Jewish community, should “never be underestimated for the incredible support it gives”; however she knows that “we can support people to hopefully not to hit crisis points, if people are held through challenging transitional moments in the best possible way.
“All religions support people at moments of transition, but mostly the ones that were identified in centuries gone by; birth, marriage and death. Wellspring can definitely work as a blueprint to encourage other religions to see it as their role to innovate and identify the other moments of transition they need to ritualise and support, translating the ideas into their own models of ritual and in their own appropriate spaces.
As a final thought as to the influence of her biblical namesake, she confides that her late mother “really wanted to name me Heidi when I was born after her dad, Hymie, who had recently died.”
She says she often wonders how different her life would have been with such a different name.
“Miriam,” she says, “was not only a strong leader but she preserved Jewish identity even as a slave in Egypt and was willing to be uprooted from the familiar to venture into a new land.
“I am also struck by her pivotal moments involving water, whether it was watching over her baby brother when hiding in the bullrushes by the river, singing tambourine in hand whilst crossing the sea or being like the nourishing well in the wilderness. Maybe my understanding of the power of water runs as deep as the name.”
For more information, go to wellspringuk.org.
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